Dallas Museum of Art News and Exhibitions

February 1, 2018

New Year, NICE Numbers
The DMA began the new year with a record-setting end to 2017. In calendar year 2017, 882,451 people visited the Museum, a 25% increase over last year, marking the best calendar year yet since returning to free general admission in January 2013. In July we announced that the DMA had ended its 2017 fiscal year with its highest attendance in a decade, and the second highest in the Museum’s history. The Museum welcomed 802,870 visitors in FY 2017, with the landmark presentation of México 1900–1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and the Avant-Garde drawing more than 125,000 visitors, and making Eugene McDermott Director Dr. Agustín Arteaga’s first anniversary a truly happy one.

Vision Seeking
The year 2018 also began with the opening of Hopi Visions: Journey of the Human Spirit, curated by Dr. Kimberly L. Jones. A wonderful example of the DMA’s continued commitment to presenting diverse cultures and the best art each creates, the DMA is honored to be the first location outside of the Museum of Northern Arizona to show the impressive mural by Hopi artists Michael Kabotie and Delbridge Honanie. This beautiful work depicts the history of the Hopi people and is accompanied by significant works from the DMA’s collection, from ancient to contemporary. Ed Kabotie, Michael’s son, was in Dallas for the opening week of the exhibition, where he shared his story as an artist, as well as the story of his father and Delbridge as artists. The exhibition is included in free general admission and on view through early December.

Hopi Visions was Dr. Jones’s last exhibition at the DMA. She and her husband are moving to Abu Dhabi, where he has accepted a new position.

Ambassador Row
This winter four works from the DMA’s collection will be installed at Truman Hall in Brussels, Belgium, the US NATO Mission residence of The Honorable Kay Bailey Hutchison, the US Ambassador to NATO. The Ambassador, who previously served as a US Senator from Texas, requested the DMA works through the State Department’s “Art in Embassies” program to promote cultural diplomacy. They include paintings by Lone Star State artists Frank Klepper, Reveau Bassett, and Julian Onderdonk, and the incomparable British statesman and “Sunday” painter Winston Churchill. The DMA “NATO exhibition” will remain on view for up to three years to coincide with Ambassador Hutchison’s tour of duty.

Five Decades of Deep Commitment
In January, Texas Instruments and the TI Foundation announced the establishment of a philanthropic fellowship program to honor its founders’ long legacy of giving back. Funded by a $2.1 million TI Foundation grant, the TI Founders Leadership Fellows program provides three annual nonprofit work experiences to university or graduate students planning a nonprofit career. The fellowships, designed to build a pipeline of nonprofit leaders in the Dallas area over the next 20 years, were established in collaboration with three local organizations with strong ties to TI’s founders: the Dallas Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Dallas, and United Way of Metropolitan Dallas.

The TI Foundation, which has provided tremendous support to the DMA for over half a century, is also a presenting sponsor this year of The Power of Gold: Asante Royal Regalia from Ghana. Organized by the DMA and inspired by the Museum’s collection, it is the first American museum exhibition dedicated to Asante regalia in over 30 years.

Three Gifts of Art by Three European MastersThe DMA recently announced the gift of three major works of European art that reflect the extraordinary generosity of Dallas collectors and their dedication to expanding the Museum’s collection in meaningful ways. Zeus and Semele is a recently rediscovered masterwork by the important 17th-century Baroque painter Jacques Blanchard. Although not as well known today–a fate related to the artist’s early death at 37 and resulting scarcity of his work—Blanchard was celebrated in his day for his richly hued and sensual subjects inspired by 16th-century Venetian painting. Through the generosity of collectors Thomas C. and Jeanne Campbell, who gifted this exceedingly rare and remarkable painting to the Museum’s Foundation for the Arts Collection, the DMA continues to expand its Old Master collection with exceptional works of art.

Ann Jacobus Folz’s gave two amazing examples of European Modernism reinforcing the Museum’s impressive holdings of early 20th-century art. The first is an impressive scaled, double-sided charcoal drawing by the modern master Piet Mondrian, the eleventh example by Mondrian to enter the collection. The DMA has the second largest holdings of his work in the U.S. thanks to the continued generous giving of Dallas collectors. The front side boasts an evocative, almost painterly drawing that relates closely to the painting Farm Near Duivendrecht, in the Evening (c. 1916) in the Museum’s collection. On the back, an abstract composition titled The Sea (Ocean 2) reveals the beginning of Mondrian’s move away from representational imagery toward the grid structure that would become a hallmark of later works. “This crucial intermediary phase of Mondrian’s stylistic development was, until now, missing from the collection,” noted Dr. Nicole Myers, the DMA’s Lillian and James H. Clark Curator of European Painting and Sculpture. “With this gift, our visitors will be able to experience the dramatic transformation of Mondrian’s approach—from Post-Impressionism to Abstraction—as it unfolds across the walls of our galleries.”

The Museum also acquired from Folz a significant painting by Pierre Bonnard, its seventeenth work by this influential Modern artist. In spite of the Museum’s deep holdings, Woman with a Lamp (1909) is the first acquisition that captures Bonnard’s transition from the decorative Nabi aesthetic of the 1890s to his more abstract, brightly hued paintings from the 1920s on.